But how do you get the average user, for whom the cost of licensing the OS is completely opaque, to even think about cost at all? The computer they bought comes with Windows or MacOS on it already. Neither of which currently has any additional recurring monetary cost to the user.

You’d need mass-market laptops and desktops coming with a Linux distribution tuned well enough to run Microsoft Office and Adobe products without any more work for the user than running them on Windows. It needs to come pre installed and work so well at the “prosumer” use cases that they aren’t constantly thinking about how much easier it was to run Windows. Doing that means the OEM has to do much more unit testing and compatibility checks to ensure that when the customer opens the box and goes to install Steam and Apex or whatever that it just works without any terminal work necessary. Add to that that the OEM will want support from the company that manages the OS, and suddenly the cost to license tried and true Windows vs almost any Linux distribution for end user workstations is nearly moot.

And to make a dent in gaming, there is still an ocean to cross in terms of driver readiness and ease of use. It’s coming along, no doubt, and Valve investing as heavily as they are in Linux gaming is sure to move the needle, but it will still be an area of difficulty for some time because the user experience needs to accommodate completely custom builds with unexpected hardware configurations and box-built gaming PCs that can be OE tested and configured and everything in between.

This is fair. But at that point the same could be said of a Chromebook for her needs, which I’d venture is true for most people’s computing needs given entire swaths of the world do everything on a phone or tablet.

The Linux vs Windows debate is peculiar, because it really only applies to users who are more advanced than the average, arguing about problems that only arise when you want to do more demanding things with your machine like development and gaming. Your average user doesn’t care about any of the anti-monopolistic / FOSS reasons to use Linux, which makes the argument for them essentially “you should use this operating system that takes more work to use because it’s better for you for reasons you don’t care about.”

In order for Linux to become more mainstream, it needs to be able to exceed Windows’ performance and ease of use for gaming and productivity - which is challenging since when most users think of productivity apps, they only think of Microsoft products. It’s not enough to be equal in order to compel people to switch from what they’re accustomed to.

Gets downvoted for decrying bad people and wishing for peace. Damn.

He looked like Arab Steve Harvey.

I don’t disagree from a purely American standpoint, but I’d caution against calling a war where Ukrainians are being so heavily impacted daily and Ukrainian soldiers are fighting and dying “cheap”. It’s an inexpensive investment in the security of the region and the world on the US’s part, but no war is cheap.

Axis? Really? That’s the word? 🤦🏻‍♂️

I think that Netanyahu’s rhetoric has been clear that the hostages are not the his primary concern. His focus is on eliminating Hamas entirely. I don’t disagree that releasing the hostages needs to happen if there’s to be any hope of a deescalation, but I think it’s a longer road to the conflict ceasing than Hamas doing what they should’ve done as soon as Israel retaliated.

Sciencetits

I’m loving the FPS renaissance we’ve been seeing lately. The Boomer Shooter… boom, low poly gameplay-centric entries like BattleBit Remastered, rhythm games like Metal Hellsinger, and the latest incarnations of DooM and games seeking to mimic it are all welcome additions to the current gaming landscape. Also love experimentation happening by even established and larger developers - Gearbox’s efforts with the Tiny Tina RPGish games come to mind; though I wish they’d do a better job of addressing bugs in those games. I’d love to see more FPS-RPGs come around.

Hell - I’d love to see a ton of crossovers. It’s been a while since we had a truly great FPS platformer. RIP Mirror’s Edge.

I appreciate that his obit outlines how exasperating Kevin was. But ultimately he did a lot of good even if he did get a bit of a god complex from his notoriety. No matter how you slice it, 59 is too young, and Kevin was far from enough of a jerk to deserve that fate. I hope his family can mourn and find peace. See you on the flip side, Kevin.

I don’t think that’s true. Unless it’s a server side server denial rather than defederation, all posts on Lemmy are public. This means Threads will directly receive updates even from defederated instances.

It’s blatantly wrong. Google extended XMPP for their own purposes and when participating with XMPP no longer suited them, they left. The collapse of the “XMPP userbase” is a misnomer - those users were never XMPP users. They were Google Chat users. When Google left, XMPP was in the same state it was in before Google got on board. It returned to its status as a niche protocol for a service that, as @effingjoe@kbin.social points out, people didn’t really want anymore.

Defederating is a one-way transaction. Any instance that defederates from Threads will only stop themselves from receiving data from it, but Threads will still be able to pull data directly from any and all instances.

That’s definitely a big part of it, too. I think the app symbolizes the chain of decisions that led us to where we are right now. We said, “We want to use the site how we have been using it for a long time” and they said, “Go fuck yourself.” So we did.

Not in a manner that doesn’t also discourage me from using the site, no. And clearly, if you check my post / comment history here you can see that I was being sarcastic. But only to a point - different people want different things, and a platform like Lemmy can provide for everyone. For users like me, I want all the content in the world without the algorithm mucking up the stream to prioritize sponsored content and advertisements. I want to be able to quickly pivot between memes, sports, gaming, music, news, and technology posts all on a single platform. Had Reddit not made that impossible with their poor decisions, I would not have migrated - nor would the majority of users currently on Lemmy. This is just classic NIMBYism, but hopefully it dies out and the fediverse continues to grow in popularity, with and without Threads.

Exactly. The only reason that Lemmy is seeing such a dramatic increase in user population and activity right now is because people are showing Reddit and Spez that they disagree with what they’re doing. Will it kill Reddit? Too early to tell if we’ll even make a dent. But it’s silly to say that most people are here because of some heartfelt desire to break free from the shackles of social media.

It’s funny pictures and jokes that I read while I’m pooping, my guy. It’s not that serious.

I’m in the same boat. I want Lemmy to be a firehose of content, the overwhelming majority of which I won’t ever want to interact with. I want that because different people are interested in different things, and that’s what allows for even the niche communities to find their footing with more than a small contingent of people.

I think the tools at our disposal as users and administrators of Fediverse systems are already good enough to manage and control your own experience, and I’m confident that they’ll continue to improve at a rapid click. The experience of using Lemmy as a Reddit replacement has already improved dramatically since June 12th, and it does so every day. I appreciate that others may feel much more strongly about the “dumbing down” of the overall content and community than I do, and for those folks joining an instance that outright defederates is a great option.

Folks are quick to tell people how they should be using Lemmy. “Don’t sign up for one of the big instances, you should use a small one instead because federation” is a big one - but there’s a lot of appeal in this model with being signed up to the instances generating the majority of the content the broader community is consuming because it makes finding that content easier than it otherwise would be. My hope is that the larger instances like lemmy.world will at least test the waters with Threads federation to see what it actually does to the community before taking the step of defederation, because right now those large instances are what’s feeding the rest of the rest of Lemmy.

As it stands, having those large instances federated with Threads and having smaller communities defederated seems like a best of both worlds scenario, because a small instance defederating with Threads won’t lose out on the other content being generated by those larger instances, but those who want to trudge through the mire of mass appeal can do so in one place.

I’m hoping that this happens irrespective of other steps that may need to be taken with respect to Meta or other corporate interests in the Fediverse. Since the data is all completely public, it would help clarify “ownership” of original content, allow for meme culture and virality to continue to occur, but still give some avenue for people to raise claims against these large entities.

Someone is eventually going to try to marry a blockchain to this tech so that there’s an infinite record of content with receipts to the beginning. Privacy concerns all over the place, but it seems like such a natural extension to the already completely public nature of the content being generated throughout the fediverse.

I’m no fan of Meta or their practices, to be clear. Though I do think there are potential benefits in having the ability to communicate cross-platform, so long as some reasonable safeguards are put into place. I’m firmly in the camp that doesn’t believe that Google killed XMPP because XMPP was never a popular or widespread protocol prior to GTalk, and the users who came and went when Google did what they did were Google users, rather than XMPP users. So much like Eugen here says, it went back to how it was before they got involved.

That said, I do think that Meta in its current incarnation is an entirely different animal. I suspect that early on in a post-federated world, we’ll start seeing dark patterns intended to lure users to Threads. I’m envisioning registration gates similar to paywalls on news sites. “This content is available exclusively on Threads! Click here to register your account!” type stuff. More sinister, there’s nothing to stop Meta from appending advertisements in the body of posts created on Threads. Hell - they could go full evil genius and suppress that they’re doing it entirely on their own platform since they’ll have some other ad delivery mechanism there, which would mean the only people being served those ads would be federated users OFF of Threads who see or interact with content created on Threads.

So while I’m not a doomsayer about Threads and federation, I do think that we as a community are going to have to make some decisions about how to handle them. Having access to a community the scale that Meta will produce isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And because of how Lemmy / Mastodon / KBin / Fediverse apps work, we as users will always have the ability to control what we see in our feeds. At worst, it makes /All/ less usable, which is admittedly quite a big loss given how useful it has been to get subscribed to worthwhile content since joining Lemmy. And obviously, some instances will elect not to federate with Threads at all, which gives users choice on the type of community and content they want to interact with regularly.

With some care, likely some effort around defining usage rights for user generated content, and some new content control / filtering capabilities yet to be developed, I think that these networks can coexist in a way that is mutually beneficial to a degree, but if not - defederation is a click away.

I’m admittedly unfamiliar with Eugene, so was using the title listed in the blog post.